RE: [Axiom-developer] #pile vs. non-#pile

[Bill Page]

On August 19, 2006 6:42 PM Tim Daly wrote:
>
> > > Ralf wrote:
> > >> Anyway that is a very good example why pile syntax is
> > >> terrible.
> > Bill Page wrote:
> > > Ralf, I am sorry but your comment makes me rather angry. :(
> > Ralf replied:
> > I hope you have some mercy with me. But I cannot believe 
> > that you find that code easily readable.
> 
> Sorry for re-opening this debate again but....
>
> What possible advantage can piles claim?
> 

Hmmm... 20,000 Python programmers? ;)

http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm

(Actually it seems no one really knows how many people program
in any given language but the statistics do show some languages
becoming more popular and others declining.) My point is that a
large number of programmers do use Python and the number is
increasing.

Contrary to my philosophy on a number of other issues, I do
believe that there are very significant advantages in numbers
in open source programming. After all, what is the limiting
resource in almost every open source project? People.

One of my *first* reactions on learning to program in SPAD was
"Hey, this looks a lot like Python!"

http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/axiom-developer/2004-10/msg00109.html

So quite contrary to the opinion Tim Daly stated in a much earlier
email, I do not believe that Python (and it's programming style)
does not seem likely to disappear any time soon. And more over,
now we find the newest and fastest growing open source computer
algebra project ever - Sage - was largely motivated by and
incorporates Python in it's basic machinery both internally and
at the user interface level (iPython).

----------

But it's an old debate alright. Using indentation to represent
(not just document) program structure was in fact proposed by
Donald Knuth and several others 46 years ago!

http://jeremyhylton.blogspot.com/2006/06/using-indentation-to-represent-prog
ram.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-side_rule

http://foldoc.org/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?off-side+rule

The popularity of Python re-ignited this debate.

Myths about Indentation
http://www.secnetix.de/~olli/Python/block_indentation.hawk

But there are some well known languages other than Python use
indentation for program structure (notably: Haskell).

http://home.tiac.net/~cri/2001/indentation.html

http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~pjj/cs2112/langdes/indent.html

In my opinion SPAD and Aldor #pile syntax was not a mistake -
it was just implementing yet another important idea in
programming language design, way before it's time.

Regards,
Bill Page.